- From: Paul Derbyshire <derbyshire16@hotmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 11:33:31 EST
- To: www-amaya@w3.org
>The scripts are okay with the ";". Amaya also seems to intermittently >remove comments!. Its a pity as this seems to otherwise be a good HTML >editor, its the first I've played with that I've not given up with after >five minutes. Same here -- it's the only one to keep my long term interest, but its bugs and general lack of polish make it unusable for serious HTML projects. I suppose that's what you get with a bleeding edge experimental program that's perpetually in beta... Give me a big documentation task, and I'll probably generate the results in the form of PDF or DVI files using TeX... However, I'm lurking here waiting for the bug reports, one day, to get down to a low roar... then I might install whatever version is current then and see how it drives... I think the problem is actually all the legacy spaghetti code with pointer tangles and type unsafety written in procedural languages -- a clean rewrite from the ground up in Java would probably destroy all of the problems and very much speed up development work. Indeed, after reading _Weaving the Web_, I think what the Web needs most is a stable, robust, easy to use browser/editor combination, probably written in Java, and with a new navigational feature I dreamed up (well, more like got inspired by Natrificial Technologies' products) -- a view that shows a graph whose nodes represent Web pages, the central one being the currently open page, and whose edges represent href links -- excluding stylesheet links, embedded images, and embedded objects. The graph would show the immediate "neighbor" pages in a ring around the current page, and their neighbors in turn, and so forth hyperbolically, with a highlighted color for the current page and the nearby pages that had the same hostname and, if present, the same username (~someone) in the URL. This way you'd see the boundaries of the current site. The nodes would only be displayed to two, three, or four steps distance from the source; clicking nodes would transform the graph and change the associated browser window's address. Ultimately an XML schema might be developed to allow Web page authors to control how this navigational method worked. It could allow, say, classification of links as parent/containment, sequential, or associative-jump, and allow links to have a word attached describing the relationship, which would appear by the link arrow in the navigation. To get an idea of how such a thing would appear, I suggest downloading the "Brain" from www.thebrain.com and taking it for a test drive. The navigation interface in this file organizer software looks close to an ideal navigation interface for the Web. Natrificial has a (ick) software patent on the interface, but I expect that you guys don't believe in software "patents" and I doubt software patents are recognized in France, or wherever it is you guys operate, so they'd have no jurisdiction to sue. :-) ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
Received on Friday, 28 January 2000 11:34:03 UTC